Two for Sorrow

by it; as hard as she tried to forget it, though, Josephine knew that Marta would change her, no matter how much she claimed not to want to, and she pulled away.

Confused and upset, she got up to leave but Marta reached the door first and slammed it shut. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please don’t go. Just stay and talk to me; we haven’t finished this yet. Please, Josephine—don’t leave like this.’

‘Let me get this straight. You want to arrest the secretary of a prestigious private club—a woman with a distinguished career in nursing and welfare, who is admired and respected by all and sundry, who was Lady Cowdray’s right-hand woman—on two counts of murder and one of attempted murder without any evidence at all? Are you out of your mind, Penrose?’

The chief constable glared across his desk, and Penrose took a deep breath. ‘I wouldn’t say that we’re without any evidence at all, Sir. Sergeant Fallowfield has traced three women who died just before Celia Bannerman left for Leeds and whose bodies were unidentified at the time. Two of them were recovered from the Thames, and the third went under a tube train.’ Penrose was convinced that one of these women was Eleanor Vale; certainly, there was no trace of her in the Leeds area as far as they could tell, and while this was in no way conclusive— people disappeared all the time, as he had explained to Josephine—he had not yet found anything which disproved his theory. ‘So it’s three counts of murder, really, and one of attempted murder. I think Celia Bannerman killed Eleanor Vale, and the current crimes …’

‘I’m not interested in the death of an ex-convict from thirty years ago, and neither should you be. From what you tell me, she should have hanged anyway and the pressure on us from the Home Office is rather more contemporary than you seem to realise.’

‘But that’s my point, Sir—there is a direct connection to what we’re investigating now. I think the Baker murders and Lucy Peters’s fall happened because Marjorie and her father found out about Vale’s death and were foolish enough to try to blackmail Miss Bannerman.’

‘Yes, yes, Penrose—I understand what you think. You’ve made that very clear. But I’ll ask you again—where’s your evidence? I don’t count three unidentified bodies who happened to depart this world just as Celia Bannerman was catching a train as incontrovertible proof. London’s full of women who disappear without leaving anyone behind to care—God knows it was even worse back then. And apart from anything else, the picture you paint of Bannerman’s well-intentioned interference in prison hardly fits with someone who could take a life simply because it was convenient to her.’

That was true, and the contradiction had made Penrose doubt his own theory at first; but, in his conversations with Celia Bannerman, he had detected a streak of steel, the kind of dedication and self- righteousness which occasionally blurred the boundaries between right and wrong, and he was willing to believe that her crusade to do good had, in her own mind, justified evil in its progress. The chief constable was clearly not in the mood to discuss the finer points of human nature, however, so he stuck to the basics. ‘Then there are the postcards I found in Lucy’s room,’ he said. ‘She and Marjorie had obviously been to see Ethel Stuke—the woman in the tea shop in Suffolk confirmed as much.’ It’s just as well she had, because the miraculous piece of evidence which he had hoped to find on Lucy’s camera had failed to materialise: all that the film would testify to was a girls’ day out, poignant in hindsight because of what had happened since, but nothing more than that.

‘A day out by the seaside and some idle gossip are hardly enough to warrant an arrest, though.’

It sounded thin, even to Penrose’s ears, but he pressed on. ‘Not in themselves, perhaps, but taken together with Celia Bannerman’s lies and the fact that she was on the scene at Lucy’s accident, I think we have enough to bring her in for questioning.’

‘Has Bannerman got any connection to this Baker girl other than having her frock made?’

‘No, but her father …’

‘And has she an alibi?’

‘A partial alibi.’

‘But there’s absolutely nothing to put her at the scene after two-thirty that afternoon, when she readily admits to being there?’

‘No, but she has a history with the family …’

‘And that’s all it is, Penrose—a history. What about the girl’s mother? Am I right in thinking that she has no alibi for the murder, that she was on bad terms with her family, and that she and Marjorie had been fighting in the street? Or did you make all that up just to pad out your report?’

‘Of course not, Sir.’

‘Then I suggest you concentrate on the woman you already have in custody and get a result before some do-gooder from a welfare organisation starts suggesting that we’re hounding the socially disadvantaged without good cause.’

‘I questioned her again this afternoon when I got back from Walberswick, Sir.’ He omitted to say that the interview had consisted mostly of questions relating to Eleanor Vale and Celia Bannerman, and that it had got him nowhere; if Jacob Sach and Marjorie knew something about that relationship, they certainly hadn’t shared it with anyone else in the family. Fallowfield had still been unable to establish a clear alibi for Edwards but, whilst this was a blow to the sergeant’s professional pride, it created no problematic doubts for Penrose: after the interview, he had taken her downstairs for the formal identification of Marjorie’s body and there was no question in his mind that her grief—which seemed to have gained strength from being denied for so long—was genuine. She had touched her daughter’s bruised and violated lips with a tenderness which Penrose doubted she had ever expressed while Marjorie was alive and, of all the regrets which he saw pass across her face, remorse at having killed her was not one of them. ‘The truth is we don’t have any good cause to keep her here,’ he said as patiently as he could. ‘I really don’t think it’s her.’

‘But you don’t know it’s not. You seem to be confusing the issue, Penrose. I asked you to take a look at the Cowdray Club because of some anonymous letters and a spate of petty thefts; I did not ask you to investigate the private lives of its members, and in particular of its secretary.’

‘I think they’re connected, though.’ It was a half-truth; he agreed with Fallowfield that Sylvia Timpson was likely to be behind the spiteful letters, driven by bitterness about her own abandoned career, but that didn’t exclude the possibility that Bannerman had received a threatening note from a different source. ‘Marjorie delivered two letters to the club on Friday morning,’ he explained, ‘and only one of them was from my cousins—I’ve checked that. I think Marjorie wrote the other one herself and challenged Celia Bannerman to …’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘Not yet, sir, but it seems reasonable to assume …’

‘It’s not reasonable to assume anything when you’re dealing with something as sensitive as this. I hope to God you haven’t been stupid enough to tell anyone else what’s in your mind. When I asked you to look into the matter, I told you to be discreet.’

‘To be fair, Sir, we weren’t investigating two murders at that stage. Sudden death does rather limit the opportunities for discretion.’

He knew he’d pushed his luck too far: sarcasm was never the right tack to adopt with the chief constable, and certainly not with an issue that contained such a strong political subtext. ‘Do I need to remind you, Inspector, that the murders to which you refer happened half a mile away on someone else’s premises?’ The rank was spoken in such a way as to suggest that it was a temporary arrangement which could easily be dissolved. ‘Premises owned by your family, in fact. Perhaps I should take you off this case. The fact that one of the victims was your cousins’ employee creates an obvious conflict of interests.’

The comment wasn’t worth addressing seriously and Penrose ignored it; he was arrogant enough to realise his value to the force, and he knew that the Chief would never risk insulting his integrity without a better reason than the one he had just given. ‘But Lucy Peters wasn’t half a mile away, Sir.’ He had checked regularly on the girl’s condition with Miriam Sharpe and there had been no marked improvement; she may have survived the immediate trauma but, as Sharpe had warned him yesterday, there was still plenty to worry about. ‘She was well and truly on the Cowdray Club premises.’

‘And she fell down the stairs. It’s all very tragic, I agree, but it can’t be helped.’

‘But just suppose for a moment that I’m right, Sir. Peters is in danger, because the killer will try again.’ He was careful to avoid using Bannerman’s name; it would only antagonise his superior even further. ‘Do we really want to risk that? A young girl’s death caused by our negligence—that really would be a scandal.’

‘You’ve got a man posted outside her room around the clock, haven’t you?’